Abstract

Every day, more businesses, organizations, and institutions of all kinds
generate media assets that become part of their value chains, their
know-how and production processes. We understand a multimedia digital asset
not only as a media file (audio, video, or image) but as the combination of
the file itself and its associated metadata; this allows, from
an organizational perspective, exploiting, analysis, and documentation.

About Activae project

From this perspective, it is essential that organizations have platforms
that allow the management of multimedia assets. There are several
platforms of this kind on the market [1]:
Canto Cumulus, Artesia DAM, Fuzion Media Asset Management, Nuexeo DAM, and
others. However, the number of simple and scalable platforms based on open
source software is not remarkable and that is why CENATIC [2] (Spanish
National Competence Center for the Application of Open Source
Technologies) has developed Activae [3]; a platform for digital and
multimedia asset management that is highly scalable, open source,
vendor-independent, fully developed in Python, and designed for the
Ubuntu Server.

If we were to list the features of activae according to their importance,
these would be [4]:

Scalability: Activae consists of four modules:
transcoding, data access, web frontend, and an API exported via XML/RPC.
Each one of them allows load balancing and high availability, so the
scalability possibilities are broad. It can all run on one machine or
additional machines can be arranged as required. If the use of the platform
requires more storage, you can easily hot-plug it. If you use a lot of
transcoding of multimedia formats, machines can be dedicated specifically
to this work and even more can be added as you see the need.

Load balancing: is provided by the internal engine of
the platform, the Cherokee web server [5]. Access to the application can be configured
in this way to provide service in those cases where visitors to
the platform are abundant.

Transcoding: Activae allows advanced format
transcoding in the platform itself. If, for example, a video asset
having DivX AVI format is added, it can be transformed seamlessly into a video MPEG
H.264, or FLV to web. You can even convert a video to an MP3;
Activae is responsible for automatically eliminating the video layer and
extracting the audio. It supports transcoding between 200 different
formats/containers, and most importantly, the transcoding is done
asynchronously - decoupled and detached (in the background) while you can
continue working with Activae. It is a non-blocking process.

100% AJAX GUI: provided by the CTK library [6]
(Cherokee Tool Kit), a jQuery wrapper written in Python that allows the
development of advanced, light and professional user interfaces.

The platform is fully developed in Python 2.5,
familiar to many readers: the API that is exported via
XML/RPC, the AJAX user interface, the control and business logic, the
database access, etc...

It is open source. Activae is licensed under the
New BSD License terms. This allows modification, use, distribution, sale, or
relicensing, which is an advantage to any individual, company, or
organization that wishes to use their properties for personal use or to
provide services to third parties, expanding its portfolio of products and
services and ultimately expanding their business opportunities.

As for the technical soundness of the platform, it is ensured by being
based on renowned open source components: Xapian, Cherokee, Python,
ImageMagick, FFMpeg, etc. The following figure shows more specifically
the modules that are used by Activae, how they are interconnected, and how it
used each one of them.

Model of community and government

The project is currently housed in the Forge of CENATIC [7] . For now,
the CENATIC staff is managing its evolution, although we are
completely open to incorporate more participants: the more players, the
better. Workers from companies such as Octality [8] and ATOS Origin
[9] are involved in
the process; various developers and beta testers of other
entities are conducting pilot projects to deploy the platform
(museums, universities, television networks, associations, media companies,
...)

The development model used is the "rolling release". That is, there is no
single development branch constantly being evolved. Stable packages that
contain highly tested features are released on a frequent basis. To the
extent that the merits of the developers dictate, they go on to have enough
permissions to manage their own community around the platform. No one is
excluded on grounds of origin, sex, race, age, or ideology. The community
is a meritocracy: open, flexible, and dynamic, with the main goal of
changing the product for the benefit of all.

Call for participation

The project has been released very recently. This implies that the user and
developer community around the platform is still small, although the growth
rate is quite high. Therefore, CENATIC calls for the participation in the
project to all Python developers of the open source community that want to
be part of an innovative and forward-looking project. The way to get
started is to sign up in the Forge of CENATIC and request to join the
project. But you can also work anonymously downloading the sources via
Subversion platform.

svn checkout https://svn.forge.morfeo-project.org/activae/dam

All necessary information for participation can be found in the project
Wiki [10].
Any input is welcome: developers, translators, graphic designers, beta
testers, distributors... or just providing ideas for improvements or future
features. Although the website is currently available only in Spanish, we
are working hard to get the English version up as soon as possible. In any
case, the internal documentation of the source code as well as the comments
for each commit are completely written in English.

About CENATIC

CENATIC is the Spanish National Competence Center for the Application of
Open source Technologies. It is a public foundation, promoted by the
Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Commerce of the Spanish Government
(through the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Information
Society and the public entity red.es) and the Extremadura Regional
Government. Members of the Board are also the Regional Governments of
Andalusia, Asturias, Aragon, Cantabria, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and
the Basque Country, as well as the Atos Origin, Telefonica and GPEX companies.

CENATIC's mission is to promote knowledge and use of open source software
in all areas of society, with special attention to government, businesses,
the ICT sector - providers or users of open source technologies - and
development communities. In addition, the established Spanish regulatory
framework corresponds to CENATIC general advice on legal issues,
technology, and methodology most appropriate for the release of software
and knowledge.

Manuel Domínguez-Dorado was born in Zafra, Extremadura (SPAIN) and he
completed his studies at the Polytechnic School of Cáceres (University
of Extremadura) where he received the Computer Engineering and Diploma
in Computer Science in 2004 and 2006, respectively. He worked for
several companies in the ICT sector before returning back to the
University of Extremadura as a researcher. In 2007, he obtained a
Certificate of Research Proficiency. Nowadays he works for CENATIC
(Spanish National Competence Center for the Application of open source
technologies) as Project Management Office (PMO) lead while complete his
doctoral thesis. His areas of interest include multiprotocol
technologies, interdomain routing and interdomain Path Computation
Element (PCE) enviroments, as well as the work of planning,
coordination, measurement and management in large-scale software
projects.